PIXMA G2520 Terrible printing quality, gray blacks - Can't select ICC profile

[Anonymous]

My Pixma G2520 is able to print some really nice pictures. However with default settings, they look washed out. The main difference is the gray looking black. In person it's not quite as bad as it looks on these scans, but it's still bad. And especially the printed Blade Runner poster looks really bad.

The good scan you see in the picture was created, if I remember correctly, by selecting my PC's default sRGB profile under printer menu > Main > Color/Intensity > Manual Color Adjustment > Matching > ICM > Profile (don't remember if Input Profile or Printer Profile). But now, that dropdown menu does not even show up.

Everything is printed on regular HP 90g office paper/plain paper.

What I tried:

• Printed with high and standard quality. Tried selecting plain paper or photo paper.
• I usually print everything from LibreOffice Writer, but I also tried printing them as PDFs or just as picture files.
• I tried increasing the color intensity (individual colors - no general intensity setting showing up) and contrast instead, and while that does help get slightly darker blacks (still not as good), it messes with the pictures and it doesn't look right anymore. So this is not a solution.
• I also tried reinstalling the printer and drivers, twice or thrice. Once with manually removing every trace from Canon in the registry, just in case. And I tried just installing the driver as well as installing the driver + software (IJ Printer Assisstant Tool etc.). Nothing worked.
• I tried selecting the default sRGB profile in Windows Colour Management and manually set that as default for my printer, but that doesn't seem to do anything?
• I tried printing with Print Menu > Main > Color/Intensity > Manual Color Adjustment > Matching > None. Changed something, but didn't make it look better.
• I have found old posts about similar issues, but they seemingly just used other software (like Photoshop) to select ICC profiles there and circumvent this issue. I don't have other software like that, and I'd like to be able to print regular text documents in decent quality without having to export them to other software.

I spent so many hours on this. Hopefully I can get some help here. It's driving me crazy how I clearly got a good result once but now no matter what I do it all looks terrible.

I added some scans to show the differences.

[jrhoffman75]

Your nozzle check doesn’t look correct. Does the actual test print show those colors in the black section?

[Anonymous]

They look perfect in person. I scanned with 300dpi, which causes the thin lines to block some subpixels when scanning but not others. So that's why it looks like this here, but in person they're perfect. Completely black, sharp and nothing missing.

[jrhoffman75]

OK. Have any computer changes occurred from when it worked and now?

[Anonymous]

Same computer. I printed the good print a week ago. Nothing changed since then until yesterday, when I started troubleshooting this issue, reinstaling drivers and so on.

I can also add I tried selecting the 2060 series driver for the printer and the ICC profiles also don't show up.
And I tried selecting NT EMF as data type for the print processor instead of RAW and it also still doesn't show the menu to select the ICC profile.

[Anonymous]

I think something is wrong with just the printer not using the black ink for black sections. Because you can see how much the black areas change when I changed the color intensities. So I suspect it is not using the black pigment at all and just using the colors to create black, which does not create a deep black at all.

Also I inspected the default Canon ICC profile and it doesn't look too different from standard sRGB, so I don't think that should matter.

[jrhoffman75]

Give Canon support a call. You've performed all the troubleshooting I can think of.